


The thousand small deaths of snowflakes

by leiascully



Category: The West Wing
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-06-07
Updated: 2006-06-07
Packaged: 2017-10-03 07:25:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15612
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leiascully/pseuds/leiascully
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Amy could be a light in his window.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The thousand small deaths of snowflakes

**Author's Note:**

> Timeline: S3  
> A/N: Josh is made of angst. I suppose I wrote this because I think of Josh and Amy as having a very wintery relationship, never "laughing under green leaves", which was part of the poetry fragment that was my prompt. Written for the [Rare Pairings Ficathon](http://raedbard.livejournal.com/243715.html).   
> Disclaimer: _The West Wing_ and all related characters are property of Aaron Sorkin, Thomas Schlamme, and NBC. No profit is made from this and no infringement is intended.

Our story isn't a file of photographs/Faces laughing under green leaves/  
\- Adrienne Rich

There was a fire burning in the green woods somewhere in Yellowstone, Sam had said. Not the green woods, really, the dry dead woods, which was worse: just skeletons of trees with tinder for their dead hearts. Josh took deep breaths knowing he wouldn't find traces of the harsh scent of ashes but half dreading it anyway. There was only the stale coffee smell of the bullpen and the traces of Donna's perfume. He shivered a little, just a twitch of his shoulders under his suit jacket, and went into his office. It was quieter there, crowded with his reassuring furniture and files. At a spark the papers would go up, but his desk would take a long while to burn. Josh sank into his chair, which released a whiff of Amy's perfume - she had been in the other day for her women's league thing and he hadn't been around and Donna had let her into the office anyway. Apparently she'd sat in his chair for a while; he had found her there when he came in, half sinister, turned the other way like a movie villain and then laughing at his confusion. Amy who smelled like snow and frost, clean and cool. She burned cold, terrifying in her way but not the hot flames he'd feared in his youth.

He had one photograph of the two of them that he kept in his drawer: himself suave in suit and bowtie and Amy enigmatically desirable in her red dress with her pale face and her dark hair. Only one photograph for the sum of their conversations, their midnight kiss one New Year, the way she had floated in and out of their room looking for Chris. Amy, who had come back into his life in her circuitous way. He was startled by how much he wanted to see her. She would smile her icy smile and toss her hair back over her shoulder and say hello in her lackadasical voice. It was startling how at odds her langorous casual persona was with her whip-smart focused professional self. He would hardly have recognized her in the room at the Women's Leadership Conference event except that she came up to him and kissed his cheek, a breath of cool air against his face.

"J, don't you remember me?" Her bright eyes looking up into his, her drawl, her thin shoulders underneath her fashionable blazer. He was drawn to the chill of her. He was always heated in the city. He was always fired up and fighting.

In the face of all that Western heat, he thought of her. There was a conflagration on the plains, verging into the mountains, a precious place turning into cinders. His lands were burning, the wild places of the nation he tried to keep together, and he couldn't help thinking of the ashes of his house. Skeleton trees turning to ash-furred ghosts and the skeleton of the house as it had looked later, charred and soaked. Janey's last breaths mixed in with the smell of pinesap and the fragments of sheet music drifting on the night air. He found he was sweating a little and he took a deep draught from a bottle of water still rattling and clouded with ice.

Amy could be the breeze to quell the flames in his memory. Amy could be a light in his window.

"Josh." Donna came in with a stack of files for him. "You have a meeting." He looked at her, half seeing her. She looked like springtime but the flowers were burning in Yellowstone: Donna couldn't save him from the fires of his past. She could only help him rummage through the ashes of his present. Post hoc but he needed a priori. He got up automatically and moved past her, his head filled with snowflakes and that one kiss, so long ago, a kiss that was no doubt nothing to Amy but he still remembered that his eyelashes had frozen together and the sudden tiny pains of the flurries wrecked on his cheekbones.


End file.
